[jmurphy410]

My dell mini 9 64 GB Stec is revived and well. I had resigned myself to buying an expensive laptop or ultrabook replacement. Thank goodness I was fortunate enough to stumble on this thread today. Everything I had read preiviously had indicated this was an unrecoverable situation. Thanks thanks thanks!

[jmurphy410]

I celebrated too quickly on the rebirth of my mini9. The procedure did restore the drive to indicating its full 64GB capacity in the bios settings, but i am getting an input output error writing to disc when i try to re-install ubuntu. (i had been running 10.04 and am now trying to install 11.10) Back to the drawing board.

[jmurphy410]

Am I missing something or is the stec ssd dead even though it now shows the full 64 GB capacity?

---------- Post added at 10:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:43 PM ----------

I'm off to look for a used SSD in the for sale forum, thanks to all.

[lswartz]

Did you try the disk utility before trying to install Ubuntu? It might confirm that your SSD needs to be replaced. A new SSD is pretty cheap now, but so are laptops - just a little big to carry around.

[ByteMe Networking]

lswartz is on point with his response. After working with Linux for many years, when your HDD goes read only you have issues. Best thing to do is check it with something like gparted to verify the drive is not being flagged for failure.
Or if you already have Linux installed you can fsck to make sure the file system is intact.

I hope this information helps, and would like to know the outcome of your problem.

[nikos-r]

A big thanks from me too.
My 16Gb STEC was lying in a drawer for about 6 months before i found your fix.
In my case the procedure was a little bit trickier because i had to perform the fix three times before it worked (the first time it said that it cannot erase the volume, the second time it got stuck to 50%, the third time BINGO).

[Nathanalmighty]

Just posting to thank you all for the help and to share if anyone else finds this page on google.

I got ubuntu 12 to install but it would not boot up it going to black screen and saying no operating system found. The way I fixed this was going into the BIOS>Boot, go down to Hard Drive and press "Ctrl+Enter"(By default hides HDD list) if it shows something like "! STEC PATA 16GB-(RP)" than simply pressing "Shift+1" on it will enable it for booting, problem fixed(for me atleast).

I hope it helps someone else out there.

[fredyd]

My 16Gb STEC SSD was showing up with the correct capacity, but impossible to format. The STEC firmware update downloaded from Dell site upgraded the firmware but did not fix this.
The MicroCode Upgrade tool from this thread completely retored it! Thanks a lot!
The title of this thread is misleading, because:
- it seems to work with all SSD sizes (not just 8Gb)
- it may fix other issues than the "appears as 0mb in bios" - that was the case for me, at least.

Too bad I has bought a replacement SSD a few days ago from eb*y (a 16Gb Kingspec), but this will serve as spare.

[crawlingsnake]

Thanks dude. Thank you very much!

[rummy]

ByteMe,

Thank you very much for this well-written thread, I used your instructions to resuscitate my friends 8GB SSD. Used WinToFlash to put XP back on it, applying updates now.

Thanks!